Theo of Golden
Theo of Golden
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Allen Levi on Theo of Golden
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Ninety-two faces on a coffee shop wallThe novel began not with a story idea but with an object: a set of pencil portraits hanging in a Columbus, Georgia coffee shop. Levi bought four that day, took them home, and started writing imagined conversations for each face before he had any sense of where those conversations might lead.
One day, I picked up a pen and tried to imagine myself giving the portrait to the people in a bestowal. And realized in the course of doing that this could really be an interesting story, if I can just find the right character to carry out the bestowals.
Before the portraits even arrived, Levi had spent two or three decades carrying a different novel he never finished. He framed this book not as a bid for publication but as a private test of whether he had the endurance for long fiction at all, and COVID gave him the uninterrupted time to find out.
My thinking was not to write a novel for publication but just to see if I had the muscle and the stamina, the patience, to write a piece of long fiction.
He quit by his own count roughly a dozen times. When he finally reached the end, he treated the manuscript as a completed experiment rather than a manuscript to send out, and the decision to shelve it was settled before a single reader saw a page.
When I finished writing Theo, I concluded that it was probably not a book worthy of publication. My intent was to print a copy, put it in a desk drawer, chalk it up as a good experience, and move on to the next project.
Friends read it and pushed back. He doubted whether their enthusiasm was more sentiment than solid criticism, but trusted them enough to self-publish in October 2023, with his niece handling logistics and no acknowledgment credits in the first edition because, as he put it, he wasn’t sure anyone would want their name associated.
How he wrote it
No outline, four portraits on the dinner tableWriting without a plan kept the book alive for him but cost him considerably in wasted drafts. The ending, the section that generated the most reader reaction, arrived with no road map, and he has described the experience of discovering it as equal parts exhilarating and wasteful.
I’ve gotten so much pushback about the ending...Figuring out the story as it was, going along and working without an outline or any plan, just made it that much more adventurous. It also made it that much more frustrating, because I’ve wasted a lot of paper getting to where I ended up.
One of the four portraits depicted a woman named Cheryl. Levi ate his meals with the portraits on the table, studying the faces, and built the character Ellen from what he read in Cheryl’s expression alone. He met the real Cheryl only after the book was published.
I didn’t know at the time for sure that Cheryl was homeless, but everything I could see in the portrait suggested hardship. She had a lot of road wear on her face, and so I created the character, Ellen, not really knowing anything about Cheryl’s actual story.
He discovered that Cheryl had in fact lived periods of her life without housing and rides a bicycle. The portrait had told him the truth before he knew the facts.
Making Theo Portuguese was a craft solution to a plot problem. Levi knew from early in the writing that Theo was secretly a world-famous artist, which meant the character’s nationality had to be one that wouldn’t trigger a reader’s mental list of famous painters. He worked through several European options before landing on the one country that cleared the bar.
I could not think of a single artist from Portugal. [paraphrased from audio]
Having made the choice, he then had no firsthand knowledge of the country. He traveled to Portugal with a nephew, moving from Lisbon north to Porto and the Douro River valley and spending time in port wine cellars, gathering the sensory material the book required.
His two decades as a traveling singer-songwriter gave him one specific habit he carried into the writing process: naming the actual people in the room, even when the room was imaginary. The names he lists in this passage are not composites; they are real people he was consciously writing toward.
There were times I’d be writing a scene and imagining a particular person reading it — Betsy, Cubby, Miranda, Cathey, Paul. Such moments energized me all through the writing process and reminded me that I was not working in a vacuum but with and for real people.
The personal thread
Three careers, one sentenceLevi spent roughly ten years as a civil litigator, earned a master’s degree in Scottish fiction from the University of Edinburgh, then worked two decades as a traveling singer-songwriter before writing a debut novel in his sixties. He doesn’t treat those careers as detours; he treats them as a single continuous training in the same skill.
Everything that I’ve done professionally has required me to use words to tell stories, usually to persuade people. As a lawyer, I did that. As a singer songwriter, I did that. And now as a novelist.
He settled his own standard for the book’s success before it reached any reader, and the standard had nothing to do with sales or critical reception. The frame he used was explicitly theological: the work was an offering, and the offering was complete when the manuscript was.
I wanted to prove to myself that I could finish a piece of long fiction, whether it was for public consumption or not, that that goal has been reached, and by that metric, it has been a success. And in my mind’s eye, I imagine whether anyone ever reads this book or not. When I die, I will stand before the Lord, and I will say, Lord, this is something I made for you.
On what the book is wrestling with
Kindness as a theological argumentThe novel’s faith content was a problem Levi had to solve editorially before he solved it theologically. He knew Theo was a man of deep Christian conviction; the question was how to put that on the page without closing the book to readers who don’t share it. The word he settled on for his solution is telling: not strategy, not tact, but kindness.
I didn’t want the book to be so steeped in this man’s faith that it would run off readers who don’t share our faith perspective. Out of kindness to that audience, I tried to make the story as engaging as possible without denying that this man was a character of faith.
He describes his model as something close to pre-evangelism: make the character worth loving first, and let the theology follow. His reference point is C.S. Lewis, whose account of fiction’s mechanism Levi uses to explain what he was attempting.
To write a piece of fiction, a story like Theo that makes a godly man attractive, a character like that who might draw the heart of a reader, is to maybe invite that reader to love and admire something outside themselves. It becomes an enticement of sorts, in a good sense of the word, for someone to come look and see.
The theological claim beneath Theo’s generosity is specific: every person holds a portion of the imago Dei, the image of God, that no one else in history has carried. In the Maria Shriver interview, Levi described what this belief looks like from Theo’s bench, the park bench in Golden where Theo, a retired artist, meets strangers and listens to their lives.
that nobody else has ever had in the history of the world, and being in their presence is therefore a reverent thing that is sacred. [paraphrased from audio]
Theo’s habit of studying each portrait during meals and showing up at the bench on a schedule is not characterization for its own sake. At the Barnes & Noble event with novelist Paula McLain, Levi reached for a C.S. Lewis definition to explain what kind of love he was putting on the page and why it had to be practiced rather than felt.
not merely a feeling but a deep unity...maintained by the will, deliberately strengthened by habit and reinforced by the grace we ask and receive from God. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
A man who cries at flowersHe borrowed the phrase ‘adorational attentiveness’ from the writer Eugene Peterson to name the quality he most wanted to put on the page. In the Maria Shriver interview, he illustrated it with a specific image from the book: Theo pausing on the Promenade, the central street of the fictional town of Golden, to look at azaleas.
a bunch of little singing mouths — a man who is unashamed, unembarrassed to say that flowers make him cry. [paraphrased from audio]
The point is not that Theo is sentimental. The point is that his capacity to be stopped by something small and beautiful is the same capacity that lets him stop for a stranger on a bench. Levi built the novel so that those two gestures are the same gesture.